Book of Sketches - Jack Kerouac [48]
him hobbling around
with a curious limp,
some old guy not
Neal — “He’ll
walk alright in a
few months but
come 55 & 60 &
it’ll reappear &
be pronounced —
the nerve is
affected when you
snap yr leg clean
in half like that!”
— I think of
Neal & the hobble
he’ll have at 55
Paradise Alley
October in the
wash hung court —
wash pieces flip & kick
in the cool breeze,
on the radio’s the
excited World Series
voice & the name
Ally Reynolds
(secretly smiling Indian
padding back to
dugout) —
airplane drone above
in the buzzing world
afternoon of Lower
East Side — someone
whistling — hone buzz
hum of Vibratos Manhattoes
in Million
blowers humming in
the Void Wait Time
— kids battering, yelling
— a little red wagon
hung from a hook —
a moan, nameless
speetz, the rack of
French blinds being
pulled — October in the
Poolhall, the clack of
a sodapop box no
balls click till big
dense swarmnight —
all this so well &
good — Somewhere a
motor straining —
nylons waving — a
crazy inside-deep
high thin Porto Rican
monkey rapid
woman chat blattering
“Yera mera quien
te tse que seta . . .”
Too independent to go
be begging at
anybody’s ports
for more than a
month
Plucking at
Her ha! — harpstring
To whom rapture
means
rupture
Oct 13 1953
Applied for job at
Jersey Central — offered
ground switchman
job, stand in cold
winter lining
switches & sending
kicked or humped
cars rolling down
various tracks — bleak
— healthy —
$100 every half —
4, 5 days a
week — Plenty kicks
with Mardou, plenty
jazz, wood for
fireplace & dig the
big NY this winter —
Spectral Ole
Jersey Central is
like the SP
at 3rd & Townsend,
right on water where
rail meets river —
sea actually —
now I have coffee
in JCRR lunchroom
& remember 1951
Xmas the Harding
at Am Pres Lines
Pier — etc. —
A barge graveyard
outside J Central
yards — NY Skyline
of Wall St high &
serene in pristine
October afternoon —
October sits
golden on the
iron old wood &
white gulled
rivers — The
Statue of Liberty her
weatherbeaten green
beak close looming
over sunk barges,
pier, masts, in
spokeless blue —
ferns ghost swiftly
in the channel —
excursion lowboats —
This old barge teeters
at angle, abandoned
coverless stove, stovepipe
still in, still a lot
of dry dust coal,
table, colorlost
chair — the barge’s
bottom is sunken
mosquito hive &
tenement of beams
bird limed &
boards flowing in
tarn, the tenement
of gulls!
unspeakable hidden
home, they all
flap flocked when
they heard me
crank up the board
plank — Big
iron black bits
still solid in barge
deck — The broken
barge deckhouse is
like shacks under
Denver viaduct last
summer — instead of
weeds, tarns of
green bilge slime
& one old soaked
mattress of gray
— chick gug gug
Keree Keree of
some crane motor
nearby, insistent calls
of tugs — I saw
shrouds freighters
standing in the Bay
— harbor — The
S of L, her back,
her torch upheld
to a smoky uncaring
strife torn waterfront
striking Brooklyn —
Barnacled gulled
piers standing in
low water as the
old piles of
ancient Princeton
Blvd Lost Generation
roadhouses with river
porch dancefloors &
oldtime lamps with
tassels & beer of
yore — October’s
little falling white
puffs from giant
weedfields —
Jerseyward the
gloomy men in rubbage,
the smoke of
old switch pots,
industrial & sometree
horizons in the
October Gold —
I’ll live on the
West Waterfront,
— be Wolfe
— on a day like
this exactly 12 years
ago I grabbed
her golden cunt the
moment she jumpt
into the car in
Manchester Conn. —
I was 19, horny,
October Gold was
on the hill then
too — Oil
in a map trance
slowly passes,
pockmarkt shit
with it — a
ruined submerged
bedspring like the
dump in Lowell
a giant 20 foot
plank moves over
like a long dead
snake waiting
for the sea —
— warm sun,
peaceful distant
smokes maybe of
hospital boiler rooms
— nameless faroff
yowls of trains —
Swaying newbarge
orangepainted
— the great